From Nancy Nall Derringer:
I’m not one of those journalists — and lately, I should add, I don’t consider myself much of one; I feel like I’m on a floe that has broken away from the main icecap and is steadily drifting away — who worries what will happen to Journalism when all the newspapers have been hollowed out or killed. That’s because I already know (and excuse me if I’ve said this before; I think I’ll be saying it for a long time). We’re headed into an age when we will flock to the media source that flatters our own prejudices with a unique set of facts. We had that for a long time, in fact; although nearly everybody here is too young to remember when even middling cities had multiple dailies to reflect every reading niche, from labor to plutocrats. You could even make the argument that the vaunted value of Fairness and Objectivity, which in J-school you learn was handed down from Mt. Olympus, is really just a cold-eyed business tactic, that once the Workers Daily and the Plutocracy Times folded, the net needed to be cast a lot wider and the masthead slogan changed from Screwing the Proles since 1851 to Shining the Light of Truth.
